


How to live in the wasteland

by irenelefay



Series: The thawing of the Black Widow [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Ableism, Deaf Clint Barton, F/F, Femslash, First Dates, Hopeful Ending, Internalized Homophobia, Lesbian Character, Lesbian Natasha Romanov, No Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, POV Natasha Romanov, Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Red Room (Marvel), Slow Burn, Strangers to Lovers, What Happened in Budapest, comphet, of the internalized variety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 14:23:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18758206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irenelefay/pseuds/irenelefay
Summary: (Set before Infinity War)The first few months everyone just assumes that she and the Hawkeye are dating. They aren’t. Are they? It’s understandable, an easy assumption to make.(Previously The Thawing of the Black Widow)On a faithful day in Budapest, Natasha Romanova is saved.Unsure of what to expect from Clint Barton, after so many encounters with strange men while working for the KGB, she struggles to learn how to navigate her new world and accept her true identity and sexual orientation, with a little help from her new friends and a certain Witch from Sokovia...





	How to live in the wasteland

 

The first few months everyone just assumes that she and the Hawkeye are dating. They aren’t. Are they? It’s understandable, an easy assumption to make. There aren’t many women at SHIELD, so she must be here not as Natasha Romanova, but as something else, Clint Barton’s woman, for example. Allowed to exist only in relation to someone else, someone male. (There is Maria Hill, but she’s something else entirely. The archetypal typist, pencil skirt and décollétes, mixed with the spy. She knows all the secrets, Natasha doesn’t doubt it.) Anyway, when one of the secretaries sees her one morning in May of ‘07, she immediately asks her if she is looking for ‘Agent Barton’. Thing is, she is, but only because she needs the keys to his car. But the incident makes her think; he is kind to her, and she can’t tell whether he’s being the kind of nice that implies that something is expected in return.

Then one month later, in Zagreb, after the guy puts something in her drink, as Barton is holding her hair and helping her change after she’s thrown up, she feels safe, and wonders when the bar has sunk so low, and most of all when did the Widow start to feel unsafe?

They’ve been sent to Croatia to make first contact with a new source, the daughter of a diplomat or something like that; they’re sharing this tiny apartment in the city centre, in a historical building that looks very European, with the small balconies and narrow staircases, small enough for a double bed and a kitchenette and two mismatched patchwork armchairs, all very cliché. She’s Petra and he’s her roommate with benefits, Dragan; he wraps a large arm around her shoulders while they look for their source in the crowded club.

Barton is twenty-four, Natasha is twenty-three, their aliases are supposed to be three years older, that’s not a problem, espionage is bad for your skin. Apart from that – they have just moved to the city and have the right look, the right attitude for one of Zagreb’s most crowded beacons of nightlife. They order vodka with something in it, they have already forgotten what it was; their source’s name is Matea, born March 28th, 1985, five foot four, slim, eyes: brown, hair: black. She’s a petite twenty-two year old socialite, and drop dead gorgeous as she makes her way to the counter in the crowded bar, looking around nervously, oh, how clear it is that she’s not used to this. She’s wearing black skinny jeans and a glittery top exposing narrow shoulders and her pierced navel, she’s underdressed for the weather, which is kind of cold, for June, and she’s shaking, eyes wide open and mouth agape.

Petra puts down her drink and approaches her first, makes small talk, Barton’s Croatian is not good enough, he’s so hilariously bad with languages, but so very good at shooting, even with guns, should need arise, although he hates guns and prefers a bow and arrow – a  _ bow and arrow _ , in two thousand oh seven, Natasha would have never believed that, maybe she still doesn’t. Matea acts shy, contains herself, Natasha wonders if she feels safe in the club among strange men, or maybe Petra is actually threatening her? and then small talk is cut short. The passwords slip through their conversation and Matea says, in the bathroom?, and Natasha just smiles, leans forward and kisses her. Her lips are just wet enough, just plump enough and soft, like nothing else in the world apart from maybe Olga’s, forever ago, we don’t think about Olga here, these are rules, I made them, Matea kisses back and puts her hands on Natasha’s sides, they’re very cold, she’s really underdressed. Natasha grabs Matea’s dark hair, thin, straight hair that feels like it’s made of silk, gently strokes it and leads her to the bathroom, and oh, no, is that guy following us? “Wow,” she hears Clint Barton say.

If the guy really is following them, Matea doesn’t seem to notice or care, and as soon as they enter the women’s bathroom she puts her hand in her shirt, deep down into her bra and extracts something, oh, a pendrive, Natasha quickly grabs it and shoves it into her own bra, unnoticed, she hopes, because yes, the guy is following them after all, he’s just outside the door to the women’s bathroom and he has a hand in his pants, stroking manically, back and forth, back and forth, Matea’s hand joins hers in her bra, strokes her breast with little grace, fingers running lightly over stone hard nipples, and Matea doesn’t notice, or if she does, she doesn’t care, keeps kissing Natasha, strokes her face once or twice, her face that’s glowing a thousand different hues from the lights, all of it in slow motion. She smells a bit like cheap alcohol, liquid courage, it’s her first op, in a way, after all, and after a bit they go back to the main room and dance in the colored lights. Clint Barton keeps staring at them. Petra retrieves her glass. At some point, Matea must have left. Natasha’s not sure. Next thing she knows she’s back in the bathroom, no, not the women’s, the men’s. Clint Barton’s hand is on the back of her neck, holding her hair in a fist, as she throws up last week’s dinner and misses the toilet by quite a large margin.

Stupid, stupid Widow, she thinks, leaving your drink unattended, such a rookie mistake. Wasn’t Barton supposed to keep an eye on it?  _ Has _ Clint Barton spiked her drink? Probably not, because when she stops puking he just walks her home, supporting her trembling frame with large arms, when they get home he helps her undress and put on some comfortable clothes for the night, Natasha doesn’t really do pijamas, not strictly speaking, at least, then he lays her on her side in the king size bed, then pushes the mismatched armchairs together in the small living room and falls asleep there.

But overall yes, it’s an easy assumption to make. He’d been sent after her in Budapest, after all, and he’d come back changed, the way a woman’s love changes men, cures them, as everyone knows, it’s a tale as old as time, how many movies and books revolve around that, women’s emotional labor. One night in Zagreb she stops to look at him while he’s cooking an omelette with zucchini – it is a couple of days after the whole spiked drink incident, they still haven’t handed the pendrive over to SHIELD – and something about the way he moves catches her attention, something about the way he acts so casual when he’s around her, shoulders relaxed, a clunky hearing aid emerging from his dark blonde hair, from an old pair that he doesn’t allow anyone else to see. And she wonders: could I love him?

She forces herself to have a rather vivid fantasy in which he takes her right then and there on the kitchen table among the scattered clothes they’ve been given to look convincing, since they’re undercover as a young couple of wealthy university students. Clint Barton grew up in a circus and none of them has actually finished high school so joke’s on SHIELD, really, if they blow it, has Barton even finished primary school? She doesn’t think so. His spelling is shoddy at best. In the fantasy he takes her fiercely from behind, hands on her sides like motorcycle handles, while biting her neck and talking dirty to her, in English, she thinks in English nowadays, she always had a gift for languages. She even selects all the right tactile sensations, all the right emotions from her rather vast repertoire. It causes her no arousal. Rather, the strange feeling that the man pounding into her from behind, who looks so much like Clint, is not Clint at all, and worst of all the sound of trust being shattered, the trust that he established in that men’s bathroom, while he held her hair.

Maybe, she thinks, it is because of the sex. There is more to love than just sex, she’s been told. There has to be – she’s in too deep, she’s had sex with too many strange men to accept anything else as the truth at this point. Is Clint a virgin? Has Clint ever had sex for intel? Has he ever had to? But again the thought of Clint in any kind of sexual context makes her skin crawl. She wipes her mind clean from the image. Again she looks at his arms, covered in thick, light hair, the arms that are his livelihood, that he uses to shoot arrows at bad guys with such precision and strength, and she wonders: could I ever love him. But then again, what does it even mean.

In Russia – where everything always began…

In Russia, she’d never been around men much. Her father had left when she was just an infant, for vodka, another woman, and another place; Natasha had been raised by her mother and her grandmother, her mother’s mother, in a family tree that was exclusively matrilinear, all the way down to Mary, to Eve. It was a strange feeling of belonging, one she’d never quite found anywhere else. In the Red Room, of course, there were no boys, just girls. She’s never thought she’d end up missing that place, and in fact she does not, but she is smart enough to know how not knowing anything else for so many years fucks you up as a person. She doesn’t miss it, truly. She’s just never felt like she belonged anywhere else ever since, and that – belonging – is something not even Clint can provide.

But it’s alright; it’s a fact of life.

***

In the end they hand the pendrive over to SHIELD at the previously agreed upon meeting point and get shipped back to the States less than a day after that. Via London. Matea’s intel is not groundbreaking but it’s a start, and someone else is put in charge of recruiting her properly, and that’s the end of it, God knows what eventually becomes of her, her wide brown eyes and skinny jeans. Natasha never hears anything about her again. Not from SHIELD and not from Clint. Clint doesn’t mention the kiss at all. Natasha wonders whether he jerks off to it when no one is looking. She hopes he does not. Thinking about it tends to put a strain on professional relationships, though, so she stops wondering altogether. They get sent to other ops, sometimes together, sometimes on their own, and when they’re together, they can still find some of that camaraderie, and besides they’re the most experienced agents they’ve got for Eastern Europe, and SHIELD notices these things, so they get sent together more often and rumours that they are dating start circulating. They laugh about it, or do they?

Clint does, however, apologise for the spiked drink incident, for not being more careful. He doesn’t usually do this kind of op – or go to nightclubs in the first place. “I thought we’d been found out, and someone had poisoned you,” he admits, and Natasha smirks. Sometimes you’re a woman before you’re a spy; the thought had never even crossed her mind.

Afterwards, Clint asks her out for dinner, for drinks. More than once. Several times. Weekly, on average. And every time, the same old fear, that he’ll want more than she is willing to give, that he’ll fall for her and she’ll hurt him, she’ll lose the only friend she’s made in the West and so on and so forth; but at the end of the day it’s the old nightmare that whatever it is that he wants, he will take, regardless of her opinion of it, just phrased differently, nicely, if you will. She swallows it down and forces herself to go, because never leaving the house is bad, and she needs to be good for the job. When they’re not in Eastern Europe they live their respective lives as friendly neighbors in a rather grey area of DC, they go to several bars together, some fancier than others, never too squalid, they always order beer but they never get drunk, Natasha can’t and she won’t. She wishes she could but she feels scared. Since when does the Widow get scared? Even though in the end he never tries anything.

In countless alternative universes they’ve had sex already, Natasha knows. In one, she’s sucked his dick in Budapest, on their very first encounter, to save her own life, and nothing past that actually happens, she’s never recruited, she sucks his dick and then she goes home, to Nikolaj, to whomever. Nikolaj takes her on the sofa and tells her, ‘you’re mine’, and she nods. She never tells him. Afterwards she and Nikolaj get married, she walks down the aisle in Volgograd dressed in a traditional white dress, exchanges Orthodox vows, even though neither of them had ever been religious at all, whose fantasy is this, who is it trying to please, Natasha says “I do” to a silhouette that bears some resemblance to Nikolaj, but it’s a faceless, Platonic idea of a man that has nothing to do with the actual, flesh and blood Nikolaj, and it’s all so sterile and robotic, it might actually be just a movie.

Or Budapest happens as she recalls it, as it really went, Clint Barton saves her from certain death by arrow and looks at her, and whistles, and fast forward a few years and instead of helping her change, that fateful summer night in Zagreb after the spiked drink, Clint shoves his hand inside of her and then his cock, thrusts a few times until he’s come, as men do, while she’s unconscious, and then falls asleep next to her in the king size bed, and in the morning he wakes before her and deletes all the traces and forever denies it ever happened, but Natasha wasn’t actually unconscious and she remembers it all.

***

In this universe Clint’s done neither of these things.

Still Natasha’s relieved when Laura appears out of nowhere in one of his monologues. He’s met her at a volleyball match. He’s one of those people who go to volleyball matches, when he’s not on mission with Natasha in Eastern Europe. Natasha doesn’t go out much, but she’s watched a ballet recital on YouTube last week. She’s made it to the four minute mark before getting too annoyed and having to turn it off. The feet, the legs, they were all off. Little girls in America don’t start pointe until their feet are ‘properly developed’, Hill has told her, Hill who has also done ballet as a teen, in Chicago. But that’s not the point. Russians are tough, Americans lack discipline. Discipline is precisely the point. Ballet is just another cage – perhaps that’s why, even though she remembers liking it, and she still remembers the moves and their French names, perhaps that’s why she’s never really felt the desire to keep dancing. After all, she never had the skinny legs, slender neck, the long lines. It defines her and little else.

At any rate, volleyball definitely lacks discipline, much like soccer, or baseball, or whatever it is that people like these days. Laura had played volleyball semi professionally in college, where she’d graduated with a degree in something to do with biology. That’s the threatening thing about her, the lack of cages, the freedom of her every movement, as their first encounter confirms. And yet Natasha never doubts that she, too, has been told to sit like a lady, to close her legs, perhaps not for the same reasons she has, but still. She tries, in vain, to convey this emotion to Clint when he asks her of all people for relationship advice. She ends up telling him to take her out for dinner at a fancy restaurant instead, which Laura will appreciate, although she’ll later admit that it felt a bit too fancy and overly formal for a first date, and not very like Clint at all, Clint who survives on microwaved pizza, how funny he looked in a shirt, wearing SHIELD’s fancy, invisible hearing aids. Natasha isn’t sure of what Clint is expecting when he asks her for relationship advice.

She is the first of Clint’s friends to be introduced to Laura and it makes her feel touched, even though she will always categorically refuse to admit it. Clint sets it up at a fancy bar that makes artisanal beer, that Natasha personally likes a lot even though she doesn’t think of herself as a beer snob. It’s December and the place has a tree and Natasha arrives fifteen minutes early as she always does, even though she knows all the entry points already, just to sit there and wait. She’s wearing leather pants and a green sweater and she’s practicing a smile. An old man sitting alone in one of the small tables notices and whistles at her. She stops smiling immediately and is called a whore. She faces the other way while the patron pours someone a whiskey. She asks for a coffee instead.

Laura is taller than her and dark haired, with pretty hazel eyes and a muscular frame, dressed in jeans and a simple purple shirt, nonthreatening, smiling, even cheerful, and orders beer. Clint also orders beer. Natasha finds out that she can’t. “Soda for me, please.” How silly it sounds. How do you even order something without alcohol in it. And God only knows what Clint has told Laura about her – when she asks, later, he just says, “that you’re from Russia.” “And what did she think of that?” “She found it cool.”

At any rate, Laura is from Wyoming and has three older brothers. Perhaps that’s what makes Natasha feel jealous, at last, in the fancy bar Clint has specifically picked for the first encounter of the ‘women of his life’, clad in tight leather pants and holding tight onto a glass of Coca Cola and feeling absolutely flabbergasted. She tries the usual test – tries to imagine Clint pounding into her from behind right there on the bar stool, pulling her hair and calling her naughty, and it doesn’t freak her out anymore, she’s tried it too many times, but it still doesn’t excite her, either. She finds herself indifferent. No, it’s something else, the uncagedness of her movements, the way she plays with her hair, the Wyoming thing, the three brothers. She takes another sip of coke and represses the thought. She’s not jealous because of him – she’s jealous of  _ her _ .

Then they all go home. Clint and Laura together, Natasha on her own. She watches another dance recital, from Vaganova, this time, and for once she has no complaints.

Not long after that Clint invites himself over to her flat – it’s January, maybe, it’s cold in DC – and while awkwardly holding a beer, legs spread wide on her old orange sofa, fumbling with the bottle and stumbling to find the right words, he eventually signs to her, using the same signs she’s learned to recognise during their very first month together, the ones he uses when he’s too embarrassed to say something out loud, a request for advice, an admission that he doesn’t have much experience with  _ that _ , you know, the circus and all, it was just men… and Natasha can’t help but smile a little. I’m younger than you, Hawkeye, she thinks, who do you think I am?

“You’re like a big sister to me,” he says in the end, after she delivers a half hearted speech about the clitoris and about how penetration is, in her opinion, criminally overrated, and it makes her feel strange, warm and fuzzy and utterly terrified. She was an only child, she has no experience with brothers and what it feels like to have one, so she really can’t say,  _ same _ , but at the same time it must be nice, and being told she is like a big sister to Clint, even though he is technically older than her, was also nice, so, close enough. So she scoops up next to him on the orange sofa, leans forwards and just hugs him. It takes him a bit to hug back, and she briefly wonders whether she’s displayed the right reaction, a worry she chases away as soon as it comes, because she hasn’t gotten the wrong reaction in ages, ever since she was twenty and straight out of the Room. She’s the queen of being able to tell what an appropriate reaction is, guessing feels so natural it sometimes makes her forget that it’s all a strategy – what for, she doesn’t know. Clint holds her back, and even strokes her hair. When she finally pulls away, he shoots her a puzzled look. She doesn’t explain.

  
***

Years pass. The week before Clint is set to move to the farm they get sent together to Kosovo to retrieve this folder that somehow left the SHIELD headquarters and contains way more intel than should be gathered in a single folder – a quick, simple thing, a matter of hours, nothing too bad – except this particular bad guy manages to send a small army after them and as she’s running on the narrow bridge, a gun in each hand, she can’t help but think, ridiculous,  _ grotesque _ , is this the life my mother made so many sacrifices for, and it’s a thought she hasn’t had in such a long time, it scares her. Three days later she helps him move a lot of boxes, while Laura suspiciously avoids the heavy lifting.

Almost seven months later they welcome little Cooper Barton.

***

Years pass. The Soldier reappears. What she tells Steve about it might not be the whole truth. But, to be completely honest, who cares. She was seventeen, and he probably doesn’t remember any of it.

Then comes Sokovia, and she briefly wonders, how come we get sent to Eastern Europe so often, is the Cold War secretly still going on? Then come the twins and by the twins she means Wanda. Wanda with her thin frame and strawberry blonde hair and abilities so powerful she could wipe up the planet, Natasha thinks, she’s not sure, no one has said that, but she’s done things Natasha has never seen anyone else do, and she’s met a Norse god or two.

Then comes Ultron and Clint’s cover gets blown, when everyone learns of Laura. Everyone’s surprised: Clint, who wears purple shirts with toothpaste stains on the front and survives on coffee and microwaved pizza, and lives, as far as the Avengers are concerned, in the filthiest of flats downtown. Clint who hates to talk on the phone and leaves his dirty clothes on the floor. When everyone learns that Clint and Natasha weren’t actually dating, that they never have been, with great surprise and, Natasha can hear it in their voices, concern, realisation? No, they could never realise. She wears high heels and keeps her hair long and straight. And even though she’s the only one who already knew all of this, she discovers that she’s also the only one in need of real mourning.

On her first night back at the farm, she allows herself to mourn, and on the first night only; she mourns the old Clint and the Avengers thinking she and the old Clint were dating; she mourns all the alternative universes than never were, the one where she sucks his dick for her life, the one where she marries the featureless Nikolaj, and all of them are worse than the one she’s currently in, but all of them are less scary. She even mourns Nikolaj, and the Room. The gates of Hell open, the valley is flooded. Then they close again. The next day Lila asks her to play.

Natasha agrees and they play with her Barbies. Lila asks her about dancing: she’s been doing ballet since she was old enough to walk. She says she really wants to go en pointe, but her teacher won’t let her just yet. Natasha had always thought it was just another American thing, a lack of discipline, and yet all of a sudden Lila’s tiny feet feel like the most precious thing left on this Earth, the last thing worth saving.

Cooper doesn’t tiptoe much around the Avengers, which makes Laura smile, although Natasha can tell that it’s making her worried, and in all honesty she can’t blame her. How does she sleep at night when Clint’s away, Natasha has never really been able to figure that out. While Lila makes tea for Natasha and the dolls, Cooper convinces Stark and doctor Banner to build Legos with him. They build a spaceship with three engines, all in different sizes, and a large glass dome on top of it that’s actually made out of an inflatable ball. There’s always a myriad Lego pieces scattered all over the large living room of the farm, and in the hallways as well. Lila’s dollhouse is also made of Lego, with every brick a different colour from the one next to it; on the coffee table there’s a tall tower with a lone window on top and a cascade of woollen hair coming out of it, Rapunzel’s hair, Lila informs her. She’s sitting with her legs crossed at the living room table, her long hair tied in a fishtail braid, telling a Barbie with a home cut short mane that she has to act more feminine, or no one will want to marry her. It’s not Cooper you should be worried about, Natasha thinks. Laura keeps cooking in the other room.

Doctor Banner joins them for tea – he also sits at the table with his legs crossed and politely answers all of Lila’s questions, but Natasha knows, she can see, that he sometimes shoots strange looks at her. She pretends not to notice and adds a spoonful of sugar to her tea. She usually drinks hers black. Maybe he thinks she’s jealous of Laura, no, not like that, jealous because she’s actually in love with Clint. How laughable it sounds, now. Banner asks Lila about school, and if she likes maths, and he tells her that physics is a very cool subject, and she looks weirded out.

In the afternoon she catches a glimpse of Tony Stark in an environment that  _ isn’t _ a multimillion dollar mansion, and it warms her heart. It’s because of the way he plays with the kid, with a desperation for approval she’s only ever seen in teenagers. They go to the barn after lunch and build one of the engines from the spaceship from scratch – it’s obviously not the right size, and it might work on a tractor, tops, definitely not a spaceship, but still. Cooper squeals in excitement and Clint smiles from the doorframe.

That night, after showering in the small private bathroom connected to the guest room that she regularly occupies, she walks in on Clint in the master bathroom, while looking for her brush. He sees him pull out a small piece of clear plastic from his left ear and hide it deep into the highest shelf of the yellow cabinet. Then he startles. He’s very easily startled while he’s not wearing his aids. Why, she signs lazily, picking up the brush from where she’d left it the night before, and he raises a finger and puts it up in front of his nose, like the girls used to do at the Red Room when they were up to no good. He has enough hearing left to fake it convincingly, Natasha is sure of that, and he can lip read very well. Why, Clint, she thinks, letting her still wet hair down and starting to comb it thoroughly. In the end it’s none of her business.

But she starts to pay attention and she starts to notice:

  1. the way Laura doesn’t always try to be in his line of sight when she speaks;
  2. the way he doesn’t instinctively move his hands anymore when he talks;
  3. the way none of the kids seem to recognise the simple signs Natasha manages to sneak into her conversations with them;



“She doesn’t know,” she states, walking in on Clint in the master bathroom in exactly the same way as a couple of days earlier and startling him again, because he’s a creature of habit at heart. He doesn’t reply. “You know you were supposed to keep SHIELD a secret, and not the aids, right?” He sighs and shoves the hearing aids in the back of the tall cabinet.

She pries and apparently Laura thinks he graduated high school while living in the foster system in Waverly, Iowa. In the end she feels that the situation is not hers to understand. The morning after they move to Stark Tower.

***

Then, again, comes Wanda, with her thin frame and strawberry hair, and she looks so young, Natasha  _ perceives _ her as so young, she’s almost scared when she finally gains access to her file through some fairly questionable means – which should be her right, after what Wanda has seen, after the dream – and among other things she finds out that the Witch is not much younger than her, that they were actually born kind of close, both in time and space. She moves into the Tower and Natasha finally allows herself to take a look. She is taller than Natasha, with long, flexible legs, much better suited for ballet than Natasha’s. Natasha has always been a bit too small, a feature that the Red Room appreciated, and has taught her to appreciate as well – it means escaping through the small cracks in the walls, hiding in all the small places, it means further invisibility.

Wanda has such elegant lines, she most definitely could be a dancer – and she probably was, like Natasha has been in the Red Room. She can almost picture the young girl in her head, leaving her parent’s small apartment in the khrushchyovka, a sports bag slung over her shoulder, headed to some local dance studio where other girls, tall and lanky like her, with loving families who lived in khrushchyovkas, practice their moves in front of the large mirror, while an older woman with blonde hair and a long neck directs them from the side. Wanda is not in the center of the spontaneous formation of ballerinas – she’s on the opposite side from the blonde woman, in the back corner, her movements aren’t as wide as they’re supposed to be, she’s almost hiding from the other girls and from the coach, trying so hard not to be noticed.

Yet Wanda’s powers beg to be noticed, while Natasha has made a brand out of not being seen, not being heard, not until it’s too late, anyway. Sneaking up from behind, emerging from under the mask, surprise, and hold them at gunpoint, the queen of her own formation. Discipline, snark, a thick coat of armour, and a baseline human underneath. Wanda is just so much more.

And yet she lives just across the hall in Stark Tower, in a spacious single room not much different from Natasha’s, with impersonal white walls and Scandinavian wooden furniture and disembodied voices who turn the light on and off, and she seems so out of her depth, the Widow sort of takes her under her wing. A week after she moves in Natasha takes her to the mall, shopping for clothes that won’t make her stand out like such a sore thumb, unlike the red coat and the vaguely steampunk outfits, the deer caught in the headlights type of look, although she can’t do much about the later, time will heal it, probably, although Natasha hopes it won’t. And she can’t stop staring at her legs while she tries on a pair of black skinny jeans, fashionable, very Western, she looks just like one of those pretty girls in New York, and Natasha thinks, I’m ogling her, and she feels dirty, like those strange men, oh, God, I’ve despised them so much that I’ve become one of them.

Natasha briefly considers buying her a wig for when she will have to be undercover, because she will have to be, someday – dark brown, maybe, it would suit her, with her light green eyes, or is it too soon to think about undercover? But then Wanda tries on a black sweater on top of the skinny jeans, and while she lifts her hair to free it from the fabric, Natasha thinks that it looks wrong, that Wanda is supposed to be colorful, that she is drowning her color in blacks, that everything Natasha touches just dies, that –

Meanwhile Wanda is looking at herself in the mirror and smiling, bending her long legs in strange, artificial angles, posing like a model on the cover of a magazine. She’s twenty-five and brighter than the sun, dimmer than she was, of course, her brother is gone and he’ll never come back, but still bright enough for Natasha to fear, I’ll break her.

“Glamorous,” deadpans the Widow, then retrieves Stark’s credit card from her pocket and heads to the checkout, while Wanda slides out of the skinny jeans and black sweater and new boots with tiny little heels and picks up her red pants from the floor, long legs bending slightly and pink underwear, the dressing room door ajar, even though Natasha is right outside, because there’s no one else in the store. “Thanks,” says Wanda at the checkout, Wanda who has probably never spent so much money on clothes all at once, or at all, since she grew up in, like, a war zone, since her parents sure as hell weren’t wealthy, even when they were alive, it was the formerly Soviet Republic of Sokovia, after all, the French tricolor with the spear.

Then the Widow takes Wanda to a bar and they sit down and order something, like, coffee, maybe, but Wanda doesn’t like coffee and orders hot chocolate instead. There’s only one other man in the bar; he is sipping on a rather large cup of coffee and reading the Sunday paper while muttering something to himself. He checks out Wanda when they walk in, Wanda doesn’t notice, Natasha does, he’s an old man with very little gray hair left and a long beige trench coat, probably works in finance, looks divorced, so Natasha pretends that he is following them, looks at him from above her thick black sunglasses, and instructs Wanda on how to react.

“Don’t turn around,” she tells Wanda, and Wanda doesn’t, and tries to act normal, it’s not the worst acting Natasha has ever seen, but as soon as she’s aware that she’s being looked at Wanda puts on an unnatural looking smile, revealing a row of straight white teeth, welcoming, harmless. “Don’t smile like that,” says the Widow, “he could take it as an invitation.” Wanda nods. She knows.

They don’t speak again until the beverages arrive and then, with carefully planned, regular pauses to take sips and recover, they begin to talk shop. The man looks at them again while Natasha pretends to stir her own coffee. In the end he leaves and Wanda smiles, a real smile, this time, although dimmed by some concern. “Should we follow him?”

“He’s probably just going home,” says Natasha.

“That was a test” Wanda says, and she has an accent, it’s melting her heart.

“Could be,” says Natasha.

“And did I pass?”

The dam breaks and Natasha has to smile. “Flying colors.”

They don’t talk about anything else, just the job, how to avoid being approached by men. One could argue that it’s not really a job, that’s just life. Sometimes you’re a woman before you’re a spy. How I wish, Wanda, thinks Natasha, how I wish that, right now, we could be neither, sexless entities floating in space, together, who have never heard of the Avengers and whose biggest problem in life is trying to remember in which area of the parking lot we’ve left Stark’s car, Natasha thinks. She ends up saying something about Clint and arrows instead, something that sounds pointless even while she’s saying it, and not very relevant right now.

“That’s a very… old fashioned way to fight,” says Wanda, and she doesn’t seem to question what on Earth it has to do with them. It makes Natasha smile. “Can he shoot, like, with guns?”

“Dislikes it, but yeah, he’s pretty good. Can you shoot, Wanda?”

“I have shot before. I don’t like weapons.”

“You might just be powerful enough to avoid it.”

Wanda blushes. Natasha feels like she’s constantly about to drop a word in Russian, or two, but then she never does, even though Wanda might start speaking it and Natasha likes the accent they have in Sokovia, even though… they’re seated in front of a large window overlooking what seems like an entire neighbourhood of NYC. Surely Wanda has never seen anything like this before. Natasha hadn’t, either, the first time, and it had left her unfazed – it was DC, not NYC, to be completely honest, but does it really matter, American cities all sort of look the same, apart from the ones in the desert, those look strange. But Wanda stares at the city lights and looks completely blown away.

It gets dark pretty soon and they head back into the underground parking lot, the car was in the orange area, Natasha drives fast in Stark’s fancy sport car and Wanda is riding shotgun with her bag on her lap and her eyes closed. She thanks her again at night, as they both go to sleep in their rooms. Natasha watches her legs and her narrow back as she closes the door behind her; in an alternative universe they’re both going into the same room, yet here, in this one, the walls are so thick, as if they’re made of some impenetrable material, and Natasha can’t get into anyone’s room and no one can get into Natasha’s, it’s not like with Nikolaj, there’s nothing left to save here.

They talk shop more often. Natasha gives her some more advice.

***

Then at some point she gets sent to Moravia, to retrieve the blueprints for a new KGB building, from an engineer they’ve purchased for a small price who works for a firm in Moscow; a small man with thick glasses who needs some convincing, but the blueprints are important, and she’s already pissed off Nick Fury enough for this year, at the very least.

Lie back and think of England, the old lady used to say back in the Room; while he thrusts into her and groans and moans in Russian, she thinks of Matea, and it’s like finding a door in the basement you’ve forgotten about and inside of the secret room the plumbing’s all fucked and there’s water, with pressure that’s been building up since 2007, such a great terrifying wave that it makes Natasha gulp and then scream.

Suddenly she’s back in the five star hotel room in Moravia and the pig is on top of her, and apparently he likes it when she screams, so she screams again, and it sounds like an animal that’s being beaten, but only half heartedly. After an acceptable amount of time she moans and tenses and plays the usual show, then she gets up and goes back inside her armour of pencil skirt and shirt and pumps; she leaves the hotel room with the blueprints in her pocket, she’s smoking a cigar he’s offered her for the bother when the assailant comes from behind. He even manages to strike her head, at first, before he’s sent backwards with just a bit of torque on his arm, and the Widow’s heel hits him hard in the middle of his chest. He groans, and it sounds just like a dying animal. She runs to the fire escape and then to the getaway car. The driver is baby faced and efficient. She’s in the air before the sun even starts to set.

Afterwards comes a long flight, and she falls asleep halfway through. She’s alone on the military jet, apart from some personnel, who knows better than try to talk to her, or to offer her anything to eat. She’s not hungry. She wants to shower and wash her skin clean from his hands. It’s an experiment she hasn’t tried in years, but, hear me out – what if the hands weren’t his, what if they were the Iron Man’s, Thor’s, doctor Banner’s? Nikolaj’s. Any man’s. A tentative hold on the flesh of her hips, the tips of their cock just touching her. It’s antiseptic and the opposite of arousing. The thought makes her shiver and it makes her think, I think I know why I made that choice back in Budapest.

She knows it’s unfair to Clint and his talent for persuasion, to SHIELD and their ideologies and to the KGB. What is a man compared to the very forces that make the world spin. No, it’s not about men – what is Natasha, compared to those forces. She’s nothing.

They land in the Tower’s very own landing strip and she goes straight to her room to collapse, then she awakes, in the exact same position she’s fallen asleep in, gets hungry and goes to the kitchen where Steve is cooking some eggs, because it’s apparently roughly lunch time; she takes a biscuit from the cupboard and eats it in small bites, asks Steve where Iron Man and doctor Banner are (they’re together at some science conference about, like, laser beams) and learns that Pepper is in DC and Clint is at home at the farm, maybe he doesn’t feel the need to hide as much anymore, maybe he’s moved on, he probably won’t be living at the Tower anymore, which is appropriate, really, for a father of, like, three, almost, when was Laura due again. Since Thor is somewhere in the galaxy beating up giant snails, as usual, that leaves the two of them at the Tower, and Wanda.

The Witch arrives wearing sweatpants and a long red woollen sweater, leftover makeup around her eyes, she must have gone somewhere while Natasha was in Moravia, she wants to know everything about it. Wanda opens a cabinet, finds some Pop Tarts. Have you also just discovered them, thinks Natasha. Then she says it out loud.

“Have you also just discovered them?” It comes out wrong: it doesn’t sound like the Widow’s voice at all. It sounds like a child’s voice. Steve might snort, fucking commies, grew up on potatoes and vodka. Wanda might think she’s treating her the way one treats a toddler. No, no, that’s not what I mean, the Widow wants to scream.

Steve raises an eyebrows, then he just smiles, Wanda smiles and nods, to Natasha’s great relief.

After that they spend the afternoon with some light training and reading together in the living room; Wanda is reading a novel in English, some love story with ghosts, Natasha doesn’t really keep up with that stuff, and there’s a word at some point, Wanda stops when she reaches it and hesitates, Natasha leans forwards and reads it and says, “it’s пуля 1 .” Why there are guns in this book Wanda’s reading, she’s not entirely sure, she’ll ask Iron Man where he found it, although it’s highly unlikely he’s the one who purchased it, she will have to ask Pepper, but it’s Tony she wants to personally bother, but he’s at a conference in Tallahassee with Banner, such a shame.

After the bullet the ice breaks, and she just tries really hard to make Wanda smile, which is hard, because she just lost her twin brother, and Natasha is an only child and can’t pretend that she knows what that must be like but Natasha has known pain and can sort of imagine. What her life was like, before that. So, by extension, what it must lack right now.

“You’ll learn to live in the wasteland,” she tells her that first night, after Moravia, after Wanda finishes the novel in English with the bullet and puts it down on the low coffee table. It sounds just as wrong as the Pop Tarts comment. Natasha reminds herself not to give anyone life advice, ever.

Wanda smiles.

“How did it go, there, in Czechia,” she asks, casually, too casually, staring at the book’s cover on the coffee table, a red triangle with a bright pink stripe. “Moravia,” she adds. She’s kept track of her location, Natasha realizes, she must have asked around about her. She’s trying to hide it, to downplay the interest, casually dropping names and locations, as if she doesn’t know exactly. That’s not an espionage thing as much as a coping mechanism, thinks Natasha, and smiles.

They’re sitting in the living room, in front of the window overlooking the city. They’ll never have such a beautiful scenery before them ever again, and they won’t miss it, to be completely honest, no one really needs a whole tower to live in, not when your childhood house was blown up by Stark Industries, or was just a small one bedroom in the bad part of town, but it’s nice, and the city lights are so nice, the fact that Wanda has remembered is  _ so nice _ .

Natasha could say so many things, she could begin, for example, with her first mission back in the winter of ‘02, the man with the intel and his thick leather gloves, the way he’d grabbed her breasts as if it was a deal that had already been agreed upon and to be honest, knowing the Red Room, it probably was, young bodies used as no more than currency, currency and weapons. He’d gone no further and she’d forgotten, water beginning to leak past the forgotten door in the basement. “It was a quick thing,” says Natasha instead, “he’d already been paid, just took some convincing, he was getting cold feet.”

“Wouldn’t SHIELD kill them anyway, if they don’t keep promises?”

“Yes,” says Natasha, “but not all energy sources are renewable,” and the other laughs bitterly and nods. “Not everyone is replaceable,” says Wanda.

“No,” says Natasha, you are not, both because of your powers, and because how many people like you are left in this world, some people are near damn irreplaceable, where would we be if we hadn’t found you that day in Sokovia, where would I be – “Having someone in Moscow is always useful,” she says instead.

Wanda nods.

“You’re from Moscow, right?”

“Volgograd.”

“Is it Stalingrad?”

“It used to be,” says Natasha, “but it hasn’t in a long time, since long before I was born,” she explains.

“My grandparents called it Stalingrad,” she says apologetically.

“So did my grandmother.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Not really, no, I don’t have anyone left there.”

Wanda nods.

“Do you?”

“An old aunt and uncle are still there,” she says, “but we were never close, and I haven’t heard from them in a long time…”

“No one else?”

“My parents died in the bombings. Pietro is dead. And apart from them…” She shakes her head.

“Not even school friends? Classmates?”

“Schools weren’t open when I was in primary school. And in high school, well, I didn’t have many friends.” Natasha nods.

“Didn’t you have a hobby? Anything?” And it might sound like a strange question but what she really wants to ask is, did you do ballet?

“I… swam,” says she hesitantly, “would go swimming, there was a pool near my new home.”

Natasha can’t help but look down at her feet, she’s wearing thick socks and sitting cross legged and she can tell she has thin ankles and arched feet made for ballet, the old lady’s voice like thunder in her head, stretch those feet, further, further. Natasha was always very flexible but never had the right feet for this, and she was always too small. Wanda probably doesn’t know that she has dancer feet, someone should tell her, she was a swimmer, though.

“I thought you’d be a dancer,” she says, “you have the right feet for ballet.”

Wanda smiles and uncrosses her legs, extending them in front of her and flexing her feet a couple of times, studying the structure, the arches. “You danced,” says she. “Is it true that you went to Vaganova before?”

Natasha can’t help but burst into laughter at the thought. Wanda looks confused. Doesn’t it sound just as insane to her?

“Нет 2 ,” she says in the end. Russian starts flowing, her words – Vaganova? – has pulled a trigger, opened a drawer that had been long forgotten. Natasha lets the language flow. “I’m too short, I have… the wrong feet,” and it doesn’t seem to make the matter any clearer to Wanda, who looks down at her feet, so she adds, “I was trained in ballet, yes, at the Room. it was the Room that you saw. In the dream.”

She doesn’t need to add that. Wanda knows. That’s the thing about her – she knows even if you’ve never told her. Would we be talking, if you didn’t know, is it like the initial energy barrier in a chemical reaction, Wanda?

“One of those facilities?” asks the Witch, such a strange word, and oh, God, the Sokovia accent, it makes the same sound that the stars would make, over NYC, if there were any stars left to be seen over the metropolis and if those stars made a sound, if that makes any sense, which it probably doesn’t, Natasha wasn’t cut out for this, she’s not a poet.

“In a Red Room facility, yes. You know them?”

“I’ve heard of them, yes. But I’d never seen one  _ before _ .”

“My mom sent me there.” It’s the first time she’s ever told anyone. Wanda raises an eyebrow. Natasha knows in what context she’s heard of them.

“How did you end up on this side?”

Natasha smiles. “I was found,” she says. “By Agent Barton, in Budapest. There was a man, back in Volgograd, we did work together, but I was in too deep, I needed a way out. Barton made some pretty damn good points.” Wanda nods. “And then he nearly got himself killed by a lab rat gone wrong.”

“You saved him!”

“I got us out of there.”

City lights reflected in Wanda’s light eyes. “And what was of the man?”

“Nikolaj?”

“In Volgograd,” adds the Witch.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Is it true that you and Barton…?”

Who has told you all of this bullshit? “No,” says Natasha, “never. He’s married.”

“I’d been told that… before,” says Wanda, somehow apologetically.

“Don’t worry,” says Natasha.

***

The next day she remembers to ask Wanda about it as well. “I know you said there was no one in Sokovia,” she starts.

“Yeah,” says she. “Only Pietro.”

“I’m sorry,” says Natasha, and does not continue.

***

Girls like Wanda have tall boyfriends, she thinks. It’s an oddly specific idea with, she has no doubts, deeper roots than she cares to admit. In the Red Room they’d been encouraged not to engage in prolonged contact with males, but even they knew better than to ban it completely. Girls would have sneaked out a lot more than they actually did. And they did, very often, foolishly thinking the old ladies weren’t perfectly aware.

They fell for tall boys with large arms and squared jaws who would treat them badly, and then they cried. Girls who didn’t cry for the worst violations the Red Room could conceive. The ladies would make fun of them for it.

Natasha never fell for any boy with strong arms and a square jaw during her time there, or even after, for what it matters. For that, she was praised by the ladies, and it was never strange – not like with Olga and her long black hair, nails clipped short and baggy wardrobe. Natasha was a girly girl, long red hair and that innocent look. You’ll be the downfall for a lot of men, her ballet teacher had once told her, for the way she could sit cross legged like no one else, she was so small and flexible, perhaps she should have been a gymnast instead.

It’s good not to be attracted to them, they’d told her, it’s one less weakness, as long as you’re not one of the ‘man hating’ ones. It actually means: it’s fine not to kiss the boys, as long as you stay pretty and desirable, speak when it’s your turn to speak, smile when they look at you and laugh at their jokes – but not too loud, it must be a lady’s laugh. As long as you walk lightly without stomping your feet, and stay fit and thin, graceful like a dancer, as long as you don’t make too much noise and don’t take up too much space. If you learn to move like a cat, silent and sensual, that’s even more dangerous than the martial arts classes, that’s the best weapon you’ve got.

It takes her ten years to master the craft, and it makes her proud. It takes her just as many, if not more, to unlearn, to realize that it’s all based on one lie: none of this is empowering.

  
***

That same night Wanda goes back to read a novel on the sofa. Natasha lets her, while she reads an article about chia seeds and nutrition and other non threatening stuff. She scoops to make space for Wanda. The other Avengers are somewhere else. They get to claim the main living room. Wanda only ever comes when she is also there. Apart from Pepper, who is in DC more often than she’s not, it’s because she’s the only other woman, Natasha thinks.

She doesn’t think about the man in Moravia anymore, it almost feels like a non-issue. She almost feels grateful to the Red Room for tying her tubes, and then it feels so fucked up she has to close her eyes shut for a bit to forget.

When she opens them Wanda is looking at her funny. “What,” she asks. “Is it a word?”

The other shakes her head. “You looked distracted,” she says.

“Maybe I’m tired.”

“Oh.” A pause. Wanda can read minds; she can make you dream and she can make your worst nightmares come true. Yet she closes her book and puts it on her lap, as if she’s ready to go if Natasha isn’t going to stay. “I’m running out of books. Can we go to the mall again?”

You illiterate fool, Tony Stark, genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist illiterate. “Yes. Of course.”

At the mall the next day they stop at a different bar. There are no old men ogling Wanda. One, who isn’t that old, is ogling Natasha from the electronics store in front of them, though. Wanda notices while she’s carrying the hot beverages and looks annoyed, and moves to another table further from the entrance.

They speak Russian as they sip on their beverages, black coffee for Natasha, hot chocolate for Wanda, she offers Natasha a sip to try it, she’s not ready for how sweet it is. Her coffee becomes a little more bitter.

She tells her about that one time Clint got stuck on the roof of someone’s private tower, and Natasha had had to send someone to retrieve him. He’d been very pissed and blamed the roofing company. In the end Wanda’s laughing, which is a victory in Natasha’s book. They lock eyes for a bit, and linger. It feels strange. Afterwards they go to the bookstore.

Natasha lets her wander, orbits close to her as if she was following her without being seen. When she realizes she stops. No, she thinks, I don’t want to threaten you. She gets closer and sees that Wanda is holding an open book, close to her chest, moving her lips as if reading aloud. She’s startled when Natasha comes, and puts it away hastily, before running away to the fantasy section with a shy smile. Natasha wonders what the whole thing is about;  _ The Price of Salt _ , says the spine. Natasha’s never heard of it.

Wanda ends up buying a large paperback that looks like it contains a whole fantasy saga. Natasha almost tells her, you’re allowed to buy more than one thing, it’s alright, but this one looks like it will keep her busy for a while. When Wanda sees her pull out Stark’s least fancy credit card – because Natasha doesn’t like carrying an Amex Black around, because it’s not inconspicuous and it’s just unnecessary – she shakes her head and pulls out some spare change from her bag. Natasha doesn’t know where it’s from and doesn’t ask.

The drive back is silent, but it’s not the kind of silence that begs to be filled – they’re not hostages, or in an elevator with colleagues, they’re just a bit tired, Wanda keeps the book safe on her lap as she rides next to Natasha, eyes fixated on the city lights. “Can you drive,” asks Natasha when they pull into the garage.

Wanda blushes and shakes her head, says, “We didn’t have a car.” Natasha might teach her, someday, soon.

But soon after that she’s sent to Slovakia. It’s a tedious op and towards the end she can’t wait to go back. She’s shadowed by this kid, Pavel, but call me Paul, it’s easier, who’s ridiculously young and tech savvy, but might use some more practice on the field. It ends in fireworks and Pavel’s cover gets blown. It was a mistake on his part, technically, but now it’s not really the time to point it out and besides he looks like he’s already going through enough.

Now, it’s happened to Natasha as well, a few times – even though if you think about it her service for the KGB really wasn’t that long – everyone forgets that, but the Widow is young. Pavel, anyway, who is twenty-eight, has a girl, he describes her as ‘smart’, she’s a medicine student, his voice shakes a bit when he realises the implications.

Natasha offers her sympathies for the blown cover before she leaves, standing on the tarmac, feeling somewhat awkward and wondering when the hell will the jet come to collect her, it was supposed to be here half an hour ago, Pavel is there waiting with her and she feels the need to say something.

“It’s OK,” he says (he has a thick accent when he speaks English), “I will manage. Everyone has.”

Technically true, thinks Natasha, but then why has this shaken me more than my own blown up covers have? While she’s in the air she looks at her watch, still displaying the Slovakian time, and thinks, five, four, three hours.

***  
  


Wanda hugs her when she comes back. She’s been away two months.

“I heard the op went wrong,” she says. It hasn’t; not by Natasha’s definition of the word. It’s not gone wrong if she’s there in NYC.

“My agent’s cover was blown. He’ll recover.”

“What will happen to him?”

“He’ll start over,” she says.

After dinner they go back to the sofa and read. Wanda is reading a new book that Natasha has never seen before; Natasha stares at the void in front of her.

“Is it alright?”

“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” says Natasha, and lifts a hand with a wide movement, that encompasses the whole room, the whole tower, the city.

“I want to be where you are,” she says, heavily, words coming out as easily as teeth that are being pulled, maybe it’s the language barrier, maybe it’s the general concept, Wanda closes the book, puts in on her lap, then on the coffee table, leans forward and hugs her. Natasha is startled, the world freezes above Wanda’s shoulder, then she hugs back, lightly, afraid to even touch the Witch.

Afterwards they go to Central Park, then to the MoMA because, last week, Natasha has bought a small Lonely Planet travel guide about NYC, underlined the most important attractions and those that she thought Wanda would like, and in front of the pictures they speak, prompted by whatever they see, they stop in front of couple kissing with white fabric covering their entire faces, Wanda whispers, “Do you think he did it to avoid drawing faces,” and Natasha answers, “He does it because his mother committed suicide by drowning, I think,” and to that Wanda replies, “I can’t draw,” even if it doesn’t really have anything to do with it and Natasha says, “Me neither,” and then they both smile. Afterwards they get Italian ice cream. They find a bench to relax and Natasha thinks that she must show her Coney Island. She’s never really been there, it’s just, it sounds like an important part of NYC to see.

“The Guggenheim’s also around here,” says Natasha, sitting cross legged on a bench, “now it’s getting late, perhaps someday… I’ve heard it’s nice,” she says.

“I love the architecture,” says Wanda, who really seems to be into buildings, she notices a lot of details that Natasha, who’s always been so pragmatic, had never known were there, makes a lot of comparisons with Soviet architecture, Natasha has never really cared as long as there were exit routes and shortcuts.

“You know it?”

“Steve took me there while you were away,” she admits, hides her face behind the ice cream cone, why didn’t you tell me?

“You should have told me,” says Natasha, and smiles, “we could have arranged something else.”

“I wanted to go with you,” she says. Pauses. “You looked like you wanted to.”

Natasha is floored and doesn’t reply.

“I know you never mentioned liking anything, but…”

“Yeah,” she answers. “It was my first time. It was very nice to go with you.”

Wanda smiles brighter and eats a mouthful of ice cream, and how does she do that, don’t her teeth hurt?

“You’d seen the MoMA as well?”

“Yeah. Steve explained a lot of stuff to me. The old ones, at least. He was very excited.”

“Surely he did a better job than I did,” says Natasha.

“He didn’t know the thing about Magritte,” she says.

“I’m blushing,” Natasha says.

“You know everything,” says Wanda.

“No, I don’t,” replies Natasha, and lifts the cone in front of her face.

When they get back to the Tower, Wanda goes to shower, but kisses Natasha on the cheek before that and says “Thank you,” and Natasha wants to say “What for,” but she’s too shocked. Her cheeks are warmer than usual. That night at dinner Wanda tells her – it slips out, really, but in that careful, obviously planned way – that she’s started training in the two months that Natasha has been away, that Hill says she’ll be ready soon. Hill, from Chicago, who used to do ballet. “I’ll talk to her,” Natasha says.

Natasha goes reading in the living room that night, but Wanda is not there. She arrives half an hour later with her hair tied into a messy bun and a Stark tablet in one hand. She’s holding Stark tech, Natasha thinks. “Sorry I’m late.”

“No worries,” says Natasha, “you don’t have to come all the time, it’s fine if you don’t feel like reading tonight.”

“What about a movie?”

“A movie?” Natasha straightens in her seat. “Alright.”

It’s a movie she’s never heard of –  _ Carol _ , it’s called, like its blonde, blue eyed main character, this beautiful and confident woman, dressed in furs and old fashioned dresses. There’s another young woman, named Therese. At some point, they kiss.

Natasha stares at the screen, at a loss for words. Wanda is staring at the screen too, ad seems to be avoiding her gaze, eyes transfixed and maybe a bit watery, until one of her beautiful, beautiful slender hands emerges from her lap and lands in the empty space between them on Stark’s sofas, an invitation, waiting for an answer, and that it gets, when Natasha also frees one of her hands, hands that have killed, held guns, caressed strange men, and it lands in that same spot and they hold each other. It doesn’t look bad and it certainly doesn’t feel wrong. Natasha finds herself staring at the tangle of fingers on the black leather, pale against the background, her heart beating a big higher up than it’s supposed to, and a bit too hard, is she going to die, is this just one of those visions people have right before closing their eyes and resting the eternal rest, and how cruel would that be, now that she sees, knows it’s possible, to lose it so suddenly – all her life she’s been strangely at ease with the idea of dying but now, now it terrifies her, please God let her have at least a kiss, may she caress Wanda’s skin with just the tip of her fingers and maybe, just maybe feel her breasts.

Then she catches Wanda looking, and yes, they are watery, but she’s smiling, and it’s a childish smile, that screams victory, and even though she’s kissed more people than she can count she still can’t see it coming when Wanda leans in and presses a kiss on just the tip of her lips, and it smells like strawberries and hot chocolate and spices, and as Wanda deepens it she’s still in denials, she thinks.

The rest of the movie plays in the background; Natasha runs a finger through her hair, and feels her skin with just the tip of her fingers and feels a breast, too. Then at some point she’s laying and Wanda is on top of her, hands on her cheeks, her hair, her shoulders, fumbling happily on cotton and the leather of the sofa, when she misses.

Carol sensually kisses every part of Therese’s body, on screen. Natasha is reminded of just how warm a living, breathing body on top of her feels, how heavy and yet light Wanda’s chest feels on top of hers.

Then a door is slammed and they seem to bounce back, like springs, like those tiny bouncy balls children play with; the credits start playing and Tony Stark walks in, whistling. If he shoots them a strange look, Natasha doesn’t even notice.

***

That same night she dreams of a man. He’s large and featureless, like the mannequin she has married in that one alternative universe, back in Volgograd. He’s Nikolaj, and at the same time he’s not, he’s also a man with large hands who fondles her right breast, she’s eighteen and it’s her first mission, he’s also a Russian oil tycoon, the old lady from the Red Room, telling her, you’re made of marble, he’s also a civil engineer in a hotel room in Moravia, all fused together in this Ultron-like behemoth of a man, who has hands, and she’s with the Avengers, walking on the tarmac, when he approaches and drags her to the ground, without any visible effort, and she’s facing the ground while he thrusts, once, twice, three times, he pulls at her hair and keeps saying the same thing, in no particular language, because it’s a dream: your body is not your own.

She awakens to someone in her room. Training has left her a light sleeper. It’s a good trait for a spy. It saves lives. Wanda is at the foot of her bed, the bedroom door ajar. “You were projecting,” she says. Then sits at the furthest end of the bed, legs curled up underneath the slim body, and says: “What’s wrong, Natasha?”

The Black Widow crawls to the end of the bed until she can reach her, grabs her hand, puts it to her temple and says, “Look for yourself,” which Wanda does, closes her eyes and dives in.

They awaken the next day in Natasha’s bed, Wanda’s legs tied around the Widow’s, in a tangled web of limbs and nightclothes and long hair on both women’s faces. Natasha wakes first, as she always does. Watches Wanda’s chest rise and fall in tune with her breathing on her own forehead, slow and regular. It startles for a second and Wanda wakes. They stay like this for a while, then Natasha extracts herself, tucks Wanda in and goes somewhere, to get coffee, probably.

And Natasha thinks, this is it, I’m thawing.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> 1 Russian for ‘bullet’  
> 2 Russian for ‘no’


End file.
